Re: umass panic

I wouldn't expect good things to happen detaching a drive without
unmounting it first.

People are used to pulling out flash storage (compact flash, memory
sticks
and the like) without the system going down. Especially if no
changes have
been made to the filesystem.
Things like this need to be handled transparent and gracefully, not
panicing. (This has always been my one of biggest gripes about
Unix.)

yea, despite that it's not particularly nice to the operating system
to
remove devices without telling so first, we have to face this
situation.
I'd even prefer that non-flushed data will be kept (or transferred to
a
userland tool), so that if you notice "uh, I didn't umount!" and
insert
it back, the data can be flushed out...

The problem with this is that USB device don't have UUIDs, unlike
Firewire. So you can't reliable detect that it is the same device, it
might be another USB stick of the same brand afterall.

that's the problem of the user then. I'd just check the superblock or
such...